Italy gears up for Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ app with fear and excitement

A little-known group of Italian Donald Trump supporters has been taking to social media this week to advertise the former US president’s latest business endeavour, the social media platform Truth Social.

This is expected to launch on 21 February and is set to offer an online experience not dissimilar to that of Twitter by giving users a platform to voice their opinions – or “truths” – and post photos, news and videos.

“Stay informed about breaking news while staying directly connected with the people who influence you – don’t be shocked if they take your TRUTH viral!” reads the app’s description.

In the lead-up to the official launch, the Italy-based collective of activists Noi con Trump – “Us with Trump” – are taking it upon themselves to advertise the app through WhatsApp, Facebook and other platforms.

“Italy with Trump’s Truth, to free ourselves of the censorship and the monopoly of the big tech,” the group wrote in a WhatsApp message on Sunday.

The author goes on to encourage the recipient to forward the message to “at least five contacts”, in a tactic reminiscent of the once-popular chain emails, and to join them on the Telegram channel.

“The fight happens through information. The Deep State knows that well, the mainstream is doing an impeccable work at spreading disinformation through constant fake news,” the message concludes.

Like so many Telegram groups that have gained traction since the pandemic began, the Us with Trump Italian channel demonstrates the ease with which propaganda and fake news can spread online.

From unverified Covid-19 statistics and the slandering of mainstream media to calls for a Trump re-election the channel is a source of continuous information and misinformation, viewed by more than 19,900 members.

News misinformation has played its part before in Italy when, bizarrely, the country became embroiled online about the voting claims in the 2020 presidential election.

It was subsequently revealed that Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff had urged an investigation into a conspiracy theory which said people in Italy used military satellites to make US voting machines switch votes for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

In a country such as Italy, which is home to one of the world’s oldest populations, the dangers of fake news are boundless.

So much so that Italy last year joined five other countries in an Erasmus project entitled Fake news and Elders, aimed at informing and protecting the country’s elderly population from online fake news.

“Never before has the spread of fake news and disinformation been so present in our day-to-day, with the repercussions it has on our lives, health and behavioural choices,” Roberto Pili, the Italian coordinator for the project, told ANSA news agency following the announcement of the project.

There were also pockets of Italian support for Trump during his turbulent presidency.

A Pew Research Centre poll in January 2020 found that 32 per cent of Italians had “confidence in Trump”, a minority but still higher than other countries in western Europe.

It’s been more than a year since Trump’s incitement of the Capitol Hill riot led to his ban from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. At the time the former president said he would “stand up to big tech” companies.

“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favourite American president has been silenced. This is unacceptable,” Trump said in a written statement.

But like other social media platforms Truth Social will need robust content moderation and the means through which its users can report offensive or fake posts.

“Where it is going to become difficult is if they get into a situation like with Parler, where they have such a degree of hate speech that the hosting service and potentially the app store starts to take notice,” chief technology officer of the Stanford Internet Observatory David Thiel told Reuters.